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Comment Re:Missing some context (Score 1) 39

I suspect that the relationship is not linear in a case like this: cancer tends to be a big issue for otherwise healthy-ish people because a lot of varieties of it take some time to develop; either chronic exposure to whatever the carcinogen of concern is or some time after the exposure when your luck with the mechanisms that suppress abnormal cell division eventually fails, or both.

There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but anyone who is really hitting the sauce and succumbing to DUIs, cirrhosis, or other non-cancer alcohol mortality is making themselves ineligible for alcohol related cancer death.

Comment Re:Preparation for the "own nothing" era (Score 2) 48

How good is their game-streaming at cutting out the various 'filler' time(loading screens, startup animations telling you that Nvidia is the way it's meant to be played) and does it have some sort of 'suspend' state to handle cases where you would pause a game if it either doesn't have save on demand anywhere or takes a little while to load from save?

I know I have a bunch of games that I don't actually play all that much, in wall time terms; but Steam's 'executable run time' number is 2x-10x as high because I'm not necessarily going to save, quit, open, load if a game can be paused and alt-tabbed without crashing or continuing to eat all the GPU time to render a static image I'm not looking at; and I'm not necessarily going to do anything other than pause if I'm called away for 15 minutes by something else.

Unless the streaming service is impeccable at cutting out the various little waits it seems likely that people are going to start resenting the time limit even more than their level of seriousness and actual hand-on-controller-and-attention-locked time suggests.

Comment Re:good bye (Score 1) 48

Given that they already purchased Activision Blizzard King, including the "King" part of it, they clearly already have a considerable interest in casual players.

What is less obvious is how that is supposed to work for their streaming service. The stuff aimed at casuals, sensibly, is normally targeted at either potato-tier PC specs or the (pretty punchy in absolute terms) mobile devices that people worth targeting have.

It is much less clear whether there's a 'casual' market that demands current-gen console performance in very limited amounts rather than mobile or iGPU level titles. Given the extreme prevalence of various 'free to play' models that do sneaky monetization later it also looks like the 'casual' market's (significant) amount of money is largely locked up behind the sort of price sensitivity that requires clever psychological tricks to break through. I'm not sure that they'll be a good fit for something as obvious and psychologically burdensome as a ticking countdown timer hanging over every minute they play.

Comment This should make for some rough benchmarks... (Score 1) 47

I have no particular reason to assume that Nvidia is lying about what this software does; but unless they've stumbled on a veritable miracle it's going to mostly be a mechanism for running largely separate models of whatever size your hardware allows; not anything close to what the datacenter comparison implies.

There's a reason why Nvidia sells most of their higher end models intended for parallel use with NVLink between the chips inside the chassis and a lot of either infiniband or RDMA-capable ethernet between multiple chassis; as well as shoving a considerable amount of RAM per GPU onto those parts. And it's because latency and bandwidth matter a lot.

As it is people seek out the unified memory parts, Apple's or strix halo, or nvidia's little GB10, because the GPU having to go to main memory over a mere x16 PCIe link is already a serious problem. If you think either 256 or 512 Gb/s directly to the PCIe root on the same die as the main memory controller doesn't cut it I have some...bad news...about how well NICs are probably going to work for you, especially with the Nvidia parts that don't support RDMA even if you have NICs that do.

Comment Re:what else can it do? (Score 1) 37

Physical ones are definitely rare beasts. Hypervisors make having support for it a lot more generally useful, though. You can still run into weird edge case limitations(certain PCIe devices, under some circumstances, really don't like being detached from the host and popped onto a VM); but the hypervisor will definitely be able to tell guests stories of dynamic reconfiguration that the hardware isn't electrically or mechanically capable of supporting; and being able to add or remove CPUs or RAM without rebooting is nice.

Comment Just numbers, or some culture? (Score 3, Interesting) 72

It could certainly just be a numbers game; tons of ICE vehicles out there; or whether there's an issue with accumulated cultural assumptions and engineering priorities.

I can at least imagine that there's a difference in mindset between "this is a 12v lead acid starter battery; it'll put out a solid few tens of amps for the starter motor assuming it is working correctly; but its energy density is kind of trash and we mostly prefer not to dump additional systems onto it, especially when that exposes them to the slightly gross output of the alternator" and "This battery has been designed to fully provide for all energy requirements of a vehicle; if you displease it it will probably kill you and then burn vigorously for a day or two. A foundational assumption of all systems that need energy is that they'll be connected back to it in one way or another because there aren't other energy sources here."

Not like electric vehicle designers couldn't/don't make mistakes, and certainly some of their mistakes burn with the really exciting commitment of a large light metal fire; but the engineering culture around an ICE vehicle seems much more likely to produce a string of individually reasonable, collectively dangerous, "c'mon, it's just one little 12v system" requests that get bolted onto a fairly antique battery without too much broader thought; while analogous feature demands in a fully electric vehicle will either be judged high energy enough to potentially get brought into the high voltage wiring(which, barring gross negligence across the design is treated like it can and will kill you) or totaled in to some low voltage system budget that will be handled by a DC-DC converter designed with actual care because going from 600v to 12v isn't something you do as casually as just slapping another 12v requirement in parallel with the other stuff on the 12v battery and calling it good.

Comment I'm curious. (Score 4, Interesting) 39

This sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows what they are doing, so I assume that they know better than I; but I am surprised to hear that it is impersonating a system dll; since (in all comparatively recent windows versions) system components are signed. Absolutely tons of fuckery you can do to them and around them; but if dpapi.dll doesn't have a signature that checks out the mechanisms that try to keep OSes up and running on marginal hardware subject to random power loss will likely eventually object and attempt a repair, even if there isn't any more paranoid EDR tooling in place.

Is the on-disk copy of dpapi.dll untouched and only the in-memory instance tampered with?

Comment Stopped clock (Score 3, Insightful) 130

Trump sucks but occasionally his hamfisted ire is aimed at reasonable targets. The H1B system has been pretty terrible for workers for a long time. Employers use H1Bs to overwork and underpay migrant workers, using the serious disruption of losing visa status as a bargaining chip, while depressing the wages of permanent residents.

I don't have much faith that Trump will actually execute this move as advertised without corruptly benefiting himself or some wealthy donor, but on its face I support it.

Comment Re: humble opinion (Score 1) 61

The available information isn't terribly specific; but on the surface it doesn't sound any deeper into application internals than it already does.

You can certainly go deeper into etw trace hell; but Task Manager knows how much CPU time you are eating, your memory consumption metrics, your network traffic, and has a (currently less granular) look at your consumption of GPU time. It also having a view of consumed NPU time seems totally analogous for a new flavor of coprocessor. Only one that might involve gory poking at the application(though I'd assume would be more logically pulled from the GPU driver) would be distinguishing "GPU Neural Engine" from GPU utilization generally.

Comment What SHOULD humans learn now? (Score 1) 83

is the question we should be asking now that AI can already out-know us and will soon be able to out-reason all of us, or all but 0.0001% or whatever.

What content is still worth teaching and training?
Why, exactly, given the superior AI competition?

Is it only meta-knowledge (philosophy - epistemology, ... critical thinking ... how to learn... what learning is) that is worth being conversant in?

Maybe still a dash of probability or a fe other math topics, to have a chance of understanding what AI is telling you, or understanding how to assess its outputs?

Maybe some kinds of art and music, still? Because if we don't express we may go insane?

What.... (it will presumably be a short list. Everything on it must be justified as still worthwhile because not accessible on demand with an AI-designed and authored video short-course...)

What minimum base does a human mind need to be able to live alongside superintelligent AIs without being crushed by them (easily manipulated, misled). To be able to actually USE them (collaborate with them effectively) to advance some human purposes?

Anyone want to suggest some lists, maybe with justification?
I really think the onus is on us to justify what's worth teaching to humans now.

Comment Conversations (Score 1) 120

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

Comment Re:Need new AI editors (Score 1) 65

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

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